Tell me again why we bother with a court system?

The Bush administration wants to rewrite the official evidence against Guantanamo Bay detainees, allowing it to shore up its cases before they come under scrutiny by civilian judges for the first time.

That seems fair. I guess, if this were golf, you could call it a pre-Mulligan?

The government has stood behind the evidence for years. Military review boards relied on it to justify holding hundreds of prisoners indefinitely without charge. Justice Department attorneys said it was thoroughly and fairly reviewed.

Now that federal judges are about to review the evidence, however, the government says it needs to make changes.

The decision follows last week’s Supreme Court ruling, which held that detainees have the right to challenge their detention in civilian court, not just before secret military panels. At a closed-door meeting with judges and defense attorneys this week, government lawyers said they needed time to add new evidence and make other changes to evidentiary documents known as “factual returns.”

Rewrite the evidence? That’s inside-the-box thinking.  Read more 

A May 2005 report by Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley confirms that each interrogation at Guantánamo was videotaped. Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt issued a report the following month stating that more than 24,000 interrogations of detainees took place at Guantánamo over a three-year period. In the meantime, the Bush administration has announced it will pursue the death penalty for six detainees who will stand trial for crimes related to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Professor Mark Denbeaux, Director of the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall Law, commented, “Our students proved that Guantánamo interrogations were videotaped, which impacts the impending trials of the six detainees. We all want to see the perpetrators of 9/11 punished. But if the tapes of those interrogations still exist, it is imperative that we understand, before these trials start, whether the information was obtained through standard interrogation procedures or through torture.”

Why videotape a torture session?  Read more 

Offered without comment, except to say that McClatchy Rawks!

MEXICO CITY — U.S. authorities are assisting the Mexican government in the investigation of an American business jet that crashed near Cancun this week with four tons of cocaine on board, officials said Thursday.  Read more 

There’s a lot of verbiage in this story from AP on Bush maybe closing Gitmo, but the nut graf is buried 24 down:

[Bush’s] wife, Laura, and mother, Barbara, along with Rice and longtime adviser Karen Hughes, head of the public diplomacy office at the State Department, have told him that Guantanamo is a blot on the U.S. record abroad, particularly in the Muslim world and among European allies.

And so:  Read more 

Maybe our famously free press could turn their attention from Paris Hilton for one moment to see how Bush and his authoritarian apologists and enablers have defiled our country?

Reuters:

The U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo have betrayed the principles of fairness that made the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg a judicial landmark, one of the U.S. Nuremberg prosecutors said on Monday.

“I think Robert Jackson, who’s the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo,” Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“It violates the Nuremberg principles, what they’re doing, as well as the spirit of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.”

King, 88, served under Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who was the chief prosecutor at the trials created by the Allied powers to try Nazi military and political leaders after World War Two in Nuremberg, Germany.

“The concept of a fair trial is part of our tradition, our heritage,” King said from Ohio, where he lives. “That’s what made Nuremberg so immortal — fairness, a presumption of innocence, adequate defense counsel, opportunities to see the documents that they’re being tried with.”

King, who interrogated Nuremberg defendant Albert Speer, was incredulous that the Guantanamo rules left open the possibility of using evidence obtained through coercion.

“To torture people and then you can bring evidence you obtained into court? Hearsay evidence is allowed? Some evidence is available to the prosecution and not to the defendants? This is a type of ’justice’ that Jackson didn’t dream of,” King said.

Well, as we’ve seen with Gonzales: Since when is the criminal Bush regime about Justice?  Read more 

Jackie Whatsherface from NPR might as well have ripped her coverage from the AP wire, which is also teh suck:

With one word — “unlawful” — the only two war-crimes trials against Guantanamo detainees fell apart in a single day, marking a stunning setback to Washington’s attempts to try dozens of detainees in military court.

Now, to be fair to AP, Jackie did crank the vapidity knobs up to 11 by revising AP’s copy to read “Just one word.”

Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?  Read more 

YABL used to be one of our favorite acronyms here. “Yet Another Bush Lie!” our headlines would proclaim again and again until, really, it became redundant. “Bush Opens Mouth” we might as well have said. But this particular topic seemed to call for a YABL revival as it is particularly blatant.

For graphic starters, take a look at this lovely Map of Routes of CIA Torture Transports. A larger version can be found here at Le Monde, and even non-Francophiles will have no trouble understanding the breakdown of which flights were by the big C-130 and which by the little Gulfstream. It’s nice to have various vehicles handy for different uses, don’t you think?

But the particular lie in question comes from this story which only a couple of papers appear to have picked up. Those who watched the recent PBS/Bill Moyers story about Pressure on the Press will understand why.

The announcement that Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi was transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility from CIA custody raises worrying questions about how long he has been detained by the CIA, where he was held, what kind of treatment he endured, and whether other prisoners still remain in CIA detention. The CIA has previously detained numerous detainees for months and even years. [snip]

Now here comes the lie:

On September 6, 2006, President George W. Bush publicly revealed the existence of the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program. Although he stated that, as of that moment, there were no prisoners in CIA custody, he did not promise that the program was closing permanently.

Horseshit. He knew it wasn’t closed even as he was speaking. But to continue…  Read more 

Victory! The Ragheads are done for, it’s clear.

(CBS/AP) The Pentagon has released a transcript of a military trial at Guantanamo Bay which says that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, has confessed to a leadership role in that attack and a string of others.

“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z,” Mohammed is quoted as saying in a statement that was read Saturday at a session of his military trial.

I didn’t know they said “A to Z” in Arabic. But anyway, I’ll give him this much: he lasted four years of waterboarding, beatings, bad hairband metal blaring and buckets for toilets before breaking. That’s tough. At this rate, it’ll take us 10,000 years to win our Eternal Victory over the Towelheads.

Horror.

He began the long journey to Guantanamo Bay soon after.

But first there was an inspection and interrogation in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

He says he was stripped, shaved and covered in a mysterious liquid applied by sponge, photographed, and then had a piece of plastic forced into his rectum “for no apparent reason”. As it was inserted, a US soldier taunted him, saying the device was “extra ribbed” for his pleasure.

Mr Hicks says his introduction to Guantanamo was one of silent, disoriented dread. Injected with drugs, hooded, tightly bound and wearing goggles and ear muffs and the infamous orange overalls, he was thrown into one of the small, open-air cages of Camp X-Ray.

For weeks, he says, he and other prisoners were forbidden to talk and permitted to lie in only two positions - prone and looking up, or sitting looking straight down. No other movement was permitted other than at meal times, and any deviations from the edict, or muttered conversations, were met with savage beatings by the guards.  Read more 

If I may take a fraction of your precious attention—consumed as your attention must be by the latest extremely accurate coverage of the late, great Anna Nicole Smith’s hatred of Catholics—I’d like to talk about torture. Vanity Fair:

The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture. Why do this? Because you want to escape the rule of law. There is only one thing that you want to escape the rule of law to do, and that is to question people coercively—what some people call torture. Guantánamo and the military commissions are implements for breaking the law. Why build a prison here when there are plenty of prisons in Nebraska? Why is it, when we see photos of Abu Ghraib, we think that it is “exporting Guantánamo”? That it is the “Guantánamo method”? —Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift to the author, January 2007.

Duh.  Read more 

WaPo:

The Pentagon is invoking emergency authority to expedite funding of a war-crimes-court compound at its Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England has informed Congress.

Defense spokesmen would not say when, if ever, the Pentagon had last invoked similar authority. Nor would they specify which military construction already approved by Congress would be frozen to fund the court project, which could cost as much as $125 million, according to U.S. government documents.

The move was prompted by “national security implications and extreme urgency,” England wrote several Republican and Democratic senators and House members said in a Nov. 17 letter.

England’s letter cited “Section 2808 of title 10, United States Code” as authorization for the fast-track authority. The Pentagon would not elaborate, but it appears to be relying on a National Emergency Construction Authority Executive Order, which President Bush signed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Well, it’s not to get show trials going in time for the election, so what could it be?  Read more 

What, you thought his recent words of “discomfort” about the Administration’s Constitution killing were for real? No, Colin has and always will suck ass:

MINNEAPOLIS — Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday he was satisfied that a congressional bill dealing with the treatment of terror suspects honors the Geneva Conventions.

Powell recently criticized a Bush administration plan to redefine the conventions — which set international standards on prisoner treatment — saying he feared it could cause the world “to doubt the moral basis” of America’s fight against terror.  Read more 

Short posts for a little while. Looks like Gitmo is “Forever.” Paging Orwell, Kafka, etc:

 Read more